beautiful baby, but she can be difficult at times. It's hard not to blame yourself But it's very important to teach her how to calm herself" After Juliana left the clinic, High said, "Moms feel they need to do everything in response to a screaming child. One of the key things we teach moms with col- icky babies is that this unhealthy symbi- osis needs to be broken. The baby must learn self-soothing." As the mother learns to let the baby cry, Lester said, "the baby will realize 'Gee, I can do this.'" High and Twomey told me that the physician who referred Juliana to the clinic noted that she was very depressed. Four years ago, High conducted a survey of more than four thousand Rhode Is- land women, comparing the incidence of maternal depression and inconsolable in- fant crying. "Depression and colic were strong predictors of one another," High said. "The problem in the mother and the problem in the child exacerbate each other." High and Twomey occasionally refer mothers to a mental-health clinic at Women and Infants' Hospital for psy- chiatric care. L ester believes that some infants who suffer from colic are "hypersensitive to normal stimuli": they perceive and react to changes in their bodies (such as hunger or gas pangs) or in their environ- ment (such as loud noises or the experi- ence of being touched) more acutely than do other babies. In the mid-nineties, he studied forty-five children between the ages of three and eight who had had colic as infants (and had been seen at his clinic). He found that thirty-four of them-about seventy-five per cent- suffered from behavioral problems, in- cluding a limited attention span, tan- trums, and irritation after being touched or coming in contact with particular fab- rics or tags in their clothing. "Some of the kids would get very annoyed and refuse to put on a hat," he told me. The children apparendy objected to the sensation of having fabric on their head. Lester speculates that many colicky infants are so sensitive to stimuli that \ I &Ål 1 physical contact with their parents is un- likely to soothe them, a theory that may be supported by data from societies in which babies are held continuously. Ron- ald Barr, the co-author of the 1997 study on infant cries, has analyzed data gath- ered by Harvard researchers between 1969 and 1971, during a study of the !Kung San, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Botswana who practice a version of at- tachment parenting. 'We found that the !Kung San carry their babies upright, have skin-to-skin contact day and night, breast-feed every 13.69 minutes for the first one to two years of life, and respond within fifteen seconds to any fret or whimper," Barr, who now teaches at the University of British Columbia, told me. "The duration of the crying is fifty per cent less among the !Kung San compared with Western babies, but the !Kung San still have what we call colic, with episodes of inconsolable crying." Barr cited recent research by Ian St. J ames- Roberts, a child psychologist at the University of London, and several re- searchers in England and Denmark The group studied three sets of parents and their infants, in London and Copenha- gen. On average, the Danish parents held their babies for almost ten hours each day, including six and a half hours while the infants were awake. The British parents held their babies for about eight and a half hours a day, including six hours while they were awake. The third set, made up of both Britons and Danes, practiced an approach similar to attachment parenting known as "proximal carè': they held their infants more than sixteen hours a day, breast-fed them frequently, and re- sponded immediately to fussing. The re- searchers found that the London infants cried fifty per cent more than the Danish or proximal-care infants at ten days and at five weeks of age. But episodes of in- consolable crying occurred in all three of the groups, and there were no significant differences in the amount of "colicky cry- ing" at five weeks of age. Like most experts in the field, Barr and St. James-Roberts regard colic as an essen- tially benign condition that has no lasting effect on a child. (Barr said that the only potentially significant negative conse- quence of colic is child abuse. "More than ninety per cent of cases of shaken-baby syndrome-where a parent chokes and shakes an infant so vigorously as to cause Advertisement THE N WYOrtKErt Festiva October 51617 Ian McEwan interviewed by David Remnick Saturday, October 6th, at 10 A.M. Directors Guild of America 110 West 57th Street ($25) Judd Apatow, Seth Ragen, and David Denby Sunday, October 7th, at 4 P.M. 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